Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar: Sustainable Development Goals and Faith-Based Leadership

FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. 

As a reminder, the webinar is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on CFR’s website CFR.org. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.  

We’re delighted to have Musimbi Kanyoro and Olivia Wilkinson here with us to discuss religious communities in civil society advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs. This should be a timely conversation with the United Nations General Assembly High-Level Week upon us here in New York.  

Dr. Azza Karam will moderate today’s discussion. Dr. Karam is the founding president and CEO of Lead Integrity, a consulting group of women professionals that advises organizations on accountable and democratic leadership, strengthens human rights-based coalitions and strategic alliances, and supports multilateral institutions. She was previously secretary general of the World Conference of Religions for Peace. She has over two decades of experience with the United Nations where she founded and chaired both the interagency task force on religion and development on the Multifaith Advisory Council and she is currently a member of the United Nations Secretary General High-Level Advisory Board on multilateralism, and a dear colleague.  

So, Dr. Karam, thank you very much for being with us. I’m going to turn it over to you now to introduce our distinguished panelists and let you engage in a conversation for about twenty minutes, and then we’ll turn to all of you for your questions both written and oral. So, Azza, over to you.  

KARAM: Thank you very much indeed, Irina, and thank you for stewarding this particular space for all of us for—excellently for some time.  

So welcome to CFR’s session on “The Sustainable Development Goals and Faith-Based Leadership.” We are five years away from the fifteen-year deadline 2030 noted by a hundred and ninety-three governments when they agreed in a historic first with and after significant consultation with different organizations, civil society, intergovernmental, and others on the Sustainable Development Goals.  

Since 2015 our world has undergone a global pandemic, is today witnessing deepening of wealth disparities, inequalities, and a climate crisis threatening the survival of species and nations, in addition to armed conflicts in almost every corner of the globe.  

Global progress in the Sustainable Development Goals remains sluggish and uneven. As of mid-2025 only about 35 percent of SDG targets are on track or making modest gains. Worryingly, 18 percent are sliding backwards, according to Reuters and the United Nations.  

Encouragingly, however, the 2025 UN SDG report does spotlight some real wins in areas like universal electricity access in forty-five countries, the eradication of neglected tropical diseases in fifty-four countries, but calls for urgent action across six priority domains remain: food systems, energy access, digital transformation, education, jobs and social protection, and climate and biodiversity.  

The sustainable development report of 2025 reveals stark inequality in outcomes. So there are top performers like Finland, Sweden, and Denmark who drag up SDG index scores above eighty, whereas low performers languish between—below fifty, and conflict and fragility remain serious roadblocks.  

So we know, in addition, that digital and increasingly AI are going to be major variables alongside access to energy and electricity and these will drive development in the future, and bearing in mind that if hundreds of—millions of people in the poorest developing countries are locked out of that this does not bode well for a future of a stable global economy nor, frankly, for our global geopolitics.  

So what does religion have to do with all this? What are the advantages or disadvantages of some of the intersections between faith leadership, religious engagement on the Sustainable Development Goals, and given the geopolitical state of the world today what should be the top strategic advisements to political and religious leaders?  

To help us think through these questions we are privileged to have two remarkable women professionals hailing from the south and from the north who are with us here today.  

Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro is Kenyan-born, the chair of the United World Colleges international board, a global leader in philanthropy, governance, and social change, and she also served as an independent member of the London School of Economics Council, a chair of the Women’s Learning Partnerships Board, and a member of the UN Global Compact and CARE international boards. No stranger to the world of religious engagement, under her leadership at the YWCA where she was the first general secretary who made history as the first nonwhite leader in the organization’s 150-year history, the YWCA ensured that more than 50 percent of its top leadership positions were held by young women under the age of forty. She has had several leadership roles including within the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and the Lutheran World Federation. A widely published author, she also obtained her doctorate in linguistics from the University of Texas in Austin and was a visiting scholar in Hebrew and the Old Testament at Harvard University. Dr. Kanyoro obtained a doctorate of ministry from San Francisco Theological Seminary.  

U.K.-born Dr. Olivia Wilkinson is a senior fellow with the Faith and Global Health Initiative at the Georgetown University Global Health Institute, particularly working on the Georgetown Commission on Faith, Trust, and Health, and is collaborating closely with the World Faiths Development Dialogue, a not-for-profit organization housed at Georgetown’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Dr. Wilkinson is a researcher and an advisor specializing in the roles of religions in the humanitarian and development sectors. During her tenure as director of research at the Joint Learning Initiative on faith and local communities she co-led and co-developed research strategies and guidance with diverse humanitarian and development actors including UNICEF, UNHCR, the World Bank, WHO, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. With a Ph.D. and master’s degree in humanitarian action from Trinity College Dublin and the Université Catholique de Louvain, respectively, and an undergraduate degree in theology and religious studies from the University of Cambridge, we are very privileged to have the two of you.  

Dr. Musimbi, perhaps start us off in telling us what religion has to do with it, what are some of the advantages and disadvantages, and what are your top priority recommendations for policymakers?  

KANYORO: Thank you very much, Azza. It’s been a long time together, and I’m really glad to see you, and I’m very privileged to share this platform with Olivia, my friend as well.  

First of all, probably if I had to answer that question I would say what on earth would religion not have anything to do with but I want to talk about faith communities because religion is abstract on its own.  

When the United Nations development agenda was actually being formed, before we even got to SDGs themselves, they were very inclusive. They invited many people at the table. I know because I was at the table and because I saw the many forums of people who were asked to put input, and people from—people of faith, people from religious organizations, were not exempt from being able—to being present to the formation of the SDGs.  

This means for me that all of us who participated, whether they are coming from faith communities, from governments, from civil society, from businesses, et cetera, there is a responsibility to be concerned about the implementation.  

But religions and specifically people who work in the faith communities of societies have even a greater responsibility. They have a greater responsibility because the issues that are covered in the SDGs are issues that impact everyone that they serve in their own community. Who would say that they are in charge or they are present in a community and not be concerned about poverty or hunger or health or education of people? These are everyday—they are everyday matters, and even when we go into areas of our recent work or innovation of cities—sustainable cities and communities, these are not only geographies; they are places where people live and people live who are people of faith. 

And the last thing I want to say on defining this is to say that every site that has been done anywhere in the world has established that people—majority of the populations of the world adhere to something, believe in something, and they believe that the religions give them a direction, a hope, a stepping stone. Where we would go wrong as people of faith or as religions is when people get disappointed, and the questions that people ask when they hear that we do not meet the targets of the SDGs they ask why. Is it lack of commitment? Is it that we are not pushing enough? Is it that the finances are available, and I do say the finances are available because I know that there’s money in the world enough to meet our needs. Is it that they are not equally distributed? And I think that it’s the work of people of faith to continue to struggle with these issues like anyone else. Religions are not exempt from this discussion. 

So I want to start from there and then I will continue to elaborate on this.  

KARAM: Thank you, Dr. Kanyoro.  

Dr. Wilkinson, your perspectives, please.  

WILKINSON: Thank you, and, yes, very honored to be on this panel with Azza and Musimbi today.  

I see the role of religion across all of the SDGs. It’s a cross-cutting lens of analysis for us to think about how we see religion play different roles in societies. The SDG speaks to all these aspects of society and religious players are present in all these aspects of society.  

Religious players have been present in the MDGs, SDGs, and will be post-2030 as well. So too often it feels like religion gets put in a corner and it’s treated as a discrete and separate thing. But instead we need to come from a place of confidence to say religion is relevant to all of this.  

I’ve had a little bit of a bugbear sometimes in these conversations about religion and development that we get asked what is the added value of religion to the SDGs or to development, and religion is not an add-on. It’s already in the mix, firstly.  

But, secondly, that sets up kind of a dangerous question of trying to prove that religion is worthwhile and that it has this value and that means that you end up putting the role of religion into these boxes—the good box that’s good for the SDGs and the bad box.  

And, of course, that’s a far too simplistic way to look at all the ways that—the full spectrum of positive and negatives—the ways that religion plays a role in the SDGs.  

I come from a research perspective. I am a researcher. I’m at a research institution, and I think that we know, say, over these last twenty to twenty-five years we have seen a growing amount of research looking at the role of religion as it’s relevant to development and development goals, and that’s putting us, again, in a much more assured and confident place to be able to say we can look to the research and demonstrate across all of the SDGs there’s going to be examples of the role of religion somehow.  

So instead it’s not so much asking whether religion is relevant in the first place—that’s a given for me. Instead, we should lean into some of the complexity and the nuance of all these questions, understanding the contextual dynamics of religion in a place.  

So we can’t even talk about religions on large. Let’s see the development that’s happening in that place—how are the religious actors working—and it’s going to be really contextually specific. 

That helps us break away from these good and bad kind of categories of religious actors as well, and understanding the real range and huge, huge, huge diversity of all the types of religious actors that are involved in development in various different ways so that we don’t get, you know, stuck in little niches to say we only talk about religious leaders, for example. 

Leadership is important but there’s so many types of leadership within religious communities, and we can think about how and who and what and at what times in which places religious actors are going to be useful and part of and contributing to all the different development goals.  

But maybe I’ll stop there. I’m happy to go into specifics about some of the goals but back to you, Azza, for now.  

KARAM: We’ll definitely come back to you for the specifics. 

But I would like to ask Dr. Musimbi, you’ve heard and you have spoken yourself about the specifics and the nuances of the intersection between different religions and the Sustainable Development Goals agenda.  

What specific intersections are you—would you like to elaborate for us or highlight for today?  

KANYORO: Yeah. I want to, Olivia, begin by seeing why we’re not meeting the goals because we are not meeting the goals of the majority of the SDGs. We are meeting goals of a few but only, again, a few countries are meeting those goals. Not all of the countries are meeting the goals, and what I think that the religious community could do more about that’s how I want to talk about it. 

One is—one of the reasons that we’re not meeting the goal is that we have—we are using the resources that are available for things that we did not plan for when we are thinking about the SDGs.  

The conflicts that exist today are beyond the imagination compared to what it was when the SDGs were formed. Lots of money is used just to be in that space, which is quite wrong, quite wrong. Polarization, breaking down the multi systems that existed in the world to address conditions and to address problems together are breaking down.  

We are breaking down what we thought about solidarity, democracy, caring for the world in which we live, issues relating to climate change. We anticipated that this would be common knowledge to everyone, and investing in them both practically and financially was not going to be as debatable as we think we are.  

We didn’t prepare for the pandemics that we have faced, most recent being COVID, but that’s not the only one in the area of wellness. You mentioned that the place that we are doing better is in diseases that we don’t even often mention and I’m glad that those are progressing well, but we are not addressing also the common diseases—enough of the common diseases that inflict people.  

So the world has changed so much. We’re not doing well in knowing how to go into the future in the company of the AI, which is even stronger and becoming much more cleverer than humans.  

These are issues that—and many more and especially conflicts and wars and death of human beings and famine and hunger and starvation of children and divisions of gender issues, lack of refusing to accept that diversity in all its forms including diversity that is economic, diversity that is gender, the intersectionality that you asked me to talk about that should be prominent.  

We are eradicating the things that were the pillars that helped us to build what goodness looks like, what change looks like, what obtaining the goals of the SDGs look like. So, for me, the question that I ask today, faith leaders have moral—are always considered to have moral authority.  

That is what they are given well above even political leaders or leaders who come in from research, from science, from businesses. But often or today people are asking really big questions—have faith leaders decided to actually refuse to use their moral responsibility to confront these issues, to confront the powers that exist in the world, and what would it look like if the faith communities decided intentionally to use their voice and their moral authority for the changes that we make?  

Many of us believe we would make a step farther much better than what we are doing today. They would speak on debt issues. They would speak on financial responsibilities of different people. They would say no to the starvation of children, especially in the parts of the world where it is obvious that it’s a shame to community, et cetera.  

So that’s my big question. Are faith leaders using their authority—their moral authority, their trust that people have in them—to make a difference?  

KARAM: That’s a perfect question to segue to Dr. Wilkinson, who’s done quite a bit of research on different aspects of this.  

So, Olivia, would you care to share the extent to which you think that faith leaders have upheld or are upholding their moral authority in our present-day context with the SDGs? 

WILKINSON: That’s a big question. Let me hone in a little bit more on one SDG.  

So I’m working at the Global Health Institute so I’m choosing SDG 3 on health. And we know that religious actors are working across those targets—maternal and newborn health, fighting communicable diseases, providing health coverage where there is none otherwise—and we also know that some of the targets can be, you know, the hot button, the controversial issues for some religious systems such as access to—universal access to sexual and reproductive care.  

And we have, again, a growing evidence base, especially in many of these diseases from Ebola now recently from COVID, but HIV/AIDS, with vaccination as well. We have many examples from around the world that show how, again, religion is involved in a full range of ways in the access to care for those but also the potential perpetuation of some of the myths surrounding diseases, et cetera. 

A very now-well-known almost example in the research base is the Ebola response in 2014 and 2015 in West Africa, and research found there that exposure to the messages from religious leaders led to a twofold increase in the intention to change some of the burial practices that were found to be particularly part of the spread of Ebola.  

So, you know, we can say things like that but then what’s happening with—like, why is the religious leader in that situation so influential? And as much that has been said about the trust and authority of religious leaders to spread messages, to spread understandable, accessible, and trusted messages in communities, I think that that is the case in many situations. 

But it’s also not a guarantee and I think that’s where we go wrong in just assuming that because a religious leader we assume they have trust and authority. We assume that, therefore, they can cascade messages to hundreds, potentially thousands, of people. 

And instead I think we need to, you know, as I said earlier, look at what influence those religious leaders have. Maybe they’re more influential on one topic or another, what understanding they have of these topics, where a development organization and a religious group’s intersecting interests might lie.  

You know, it’s not going to be everyone that wants to speak out on certain topics and, certainly, if a development organization comes in with quite a top-down agenda that’s not going to be well respected and well received.  

So a lot of it is about finding ways for development and for religious groups to co-create, essentially. Make decisions together, understand each other better, and then understand how that position of trust and authority of the religious leaders can be part of the work towards achieving development goals.  

KARAM: Thank you very much to both of you.  

I think you’ve raised—you’ve begged the questions of where we’re at at the moment in terms of nowhere near achieving some of the most basic developmental needs in certain parts of the world with other parts of the world, perhaps, a little bit closer to some of the targets. 

And I think you’ve also mentioned why and how the religious faith leaders still maintain a very strong moral stature. But the collaboration between, shall we say, the secular development counterparts and the religious development counterparts is not necessarily optimal, going forward.  

You have both called for the need for that kind of optimization of an understanding of a common goal and common agenda and you have both significantly underlined some of the failures of upholding the moral authority that we see around us today.  

We are not going to ask religious organizations to do what they’ve always done long before secular states came along. They’ve been the original development practitioners and humanitarian actors and, yet, look at the state of our world today where thousands die needlessly from a number of totally preventable measures and where is the moral voice on some of these issues.  

I hope that some of our questions will help you each elaborate your respective research and knowledge experiential trends.  

So with that, I hope that we can now open for Q&A from our distinguished audience.  

OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.) 

We have a written question from Katherine Marshall, professor at Georgetown University. Professor Marshall: if you would like to read your question, you may do so now.  

Q: I wanted to pursue the discussion that both Musimbi and Olivia have raised about the question of leadership, which, of course, brings us to a distinctive feature of the panel today which is an all-women panel talking about religion.  

So I wondered how you might think about some of the questions of leadership and how one would bring the kind of leadership that you’re talking about that we see as the ideal and the real potential to change the grim situation in the world that might, for example, include women within religious circles.  

KARAM: Musimbi and Olivia, please go ahead.  

Women’s leadership in religious spaces, because we assume that it doesn’t exist or we assume that it will necessarily bring about a dramatic difference. Please go ahead.  

KANYORO: Thank you, Katherine. And first of all, I want to affirm your own leadership, especially in the Interfaith Forum which you have just led together with others, together with brother men in a very tremendous way, and I thank you for that, and many other spaces where you provide leadership.  

The SDGs have SDG number five, which talks about gender equality, but I think the SDG that is even more inclusive is the SDG that talks about reduced inequalities, which can be country but can also be, in my opinion, the macro talking about the inequalities that are also there in leadership when we don’t share the space of the leadership together.  

I have been on many forums when there are—where there are only men on the panel and it’s interesting that we are women—three women on this panel. But it’s a good way of saying to the world that there are voices that could say something that could do—and there are many, many women leaders that are doing just tremendous work everywhere.  

What is important from where, I think, is to—one, to understand the information and affirm that women make as good leaders as men when they have a mission. Women and men can make good leadership when they have a mission and they believe in the values that are important to make a difference, and the exclusion of any one of the genders doesn’t get us—or other genders doesn’t get us where we ought to be in development, and the SDGs give us opportunity to talk about them.  

When we go into the religious space we are a long way to go. We are on the way but we are a long way to go. We could do better. But for me also it’s not always the top leadership alone that I affirm.  

I affirm the people who actually get the work done at various levels. I do know that decision making makes a difference and that’s why it’s important that we also aspire, advocate, and include women at the decision making of our societies and our institutions. 

KARAM: Thank you very much, Musimbi, and I think we’ve had this conversation before, the three of us, in many different settings about women’s leadership being actually preeminent through service—that none of the religious organizations or institutions today would exist without women serving within them and with them.  

Given this notion of women as leaders anyway, regardless of whether they are in positions of decision making or not, Olivia, you’ve done some excellent research over the years as well with Professor Katherine Marshall on some of these intersections of women and leadership. 

Anything that you could, please, share or add?  

WILKINSON: Yeah, I can add something quickly.  

I love that we’ve started talking about leadership immediately. Again, it’s just so often that some of these conversations about religion and development only talk about religious leaders, and that’s why I said at the beginning let’s have a broader vision of what leadership is.  

One of my favorite examples that I’ve brought up various times is from a World Vision project where they were working on child protection, and they worked with the pastors of churches but they eventually discovered through their research and evaluation of the project that what they should be doing is working with the pastors and the pastors’ wives because the pastors’ wives were the influential figures in the communities to talk about parenting, which is what they needed to talk about in child protection.  

And that’s just, you know, a classic example that you can use from the research to demonstrate leadership comes in all types of figures and people in a community and it’s not just going to be the formal leadership.  

Of course, the formal leadership is important and you can’t bypass the formal leadership, but if we, again, contextually look at who—what are you working on in your development project, who are the leaders, you might see that it’s not the formal leadership—that there will be other people.  

It’s a young person that leads a youth group or someone that leads a women’s group, et cetera. You know, there’s all these different types within religious communities. So I think that’s where just expanding that definition of leadership and—as a lot of your work right now that’s what you’re looking at, too. 

So I think we are growing in the ways that we can talk about leadership in terms of religion and development.  

KARAM: Thank you very much to both.  

Do we have other questions, please?  

OPERATOR: We’ll take our next question from Donald Frew. Elder Frew, please accept the unmute prompt and state your affiliation.  

Q: Thank you. Thank you all for your participation here today. I really appreciate it.  

I was in an interfaith group locally where the group leadership insisted that ending poverty and hunger were, obviously, the most important of the SDGs. In support of this, they pointed to these two being enumerated first and so they said the group should focus on these two SDGs. 

While my own faith tradition focuses more on gender equality and the environment, I felt that the SDGs were all meant to work together synergistically. Was this the intention when they were created?  

Thank you.  

KARAM: Drs. Musimbi and Wilkinson, there’s, obviously, yes, an answer that very clearly in the preamble to the SDGs all of these are meant to be working together. You’re not going to realize one at the expense of the other. You’re not going to realize one without looking at the other. 

But some of your own thoughts and reflections, please, Dr. Kanyoro? 

KANYORO: That’s exactly what you have said, Azza.  

It’s true. These SDGs are equally important. If you took, for example, poverty and you actually do a diagnosis of who is poor, you will actually find that you are coming to gender issues. You will actually find that you are coming to people who lack economic possibilities.  

You actually find that you are coming to people whose health is poor and so they cannot sustain whatever is coming, and if you took one of them—let’s say you took clean water and sanitation, for example, which is SDG number six, who is—could you be able really to talk about that without talking about poverty? Without talking how that causes disease when there’s no clean water?  

There’s really no SDG that is just independent. In fact, the choice of seventeen out of the issues of the world was to give us some focus as a global community that in certain people will be able to frame some of these SDGs and concentrate on them because that’s the area they work in.  

If you are, for example, in the health ministry or in the health work then you can go to the farthest on the SDG that deals with health, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t see the intersectionality between all of these SDGs.  

The SDG which talks about partnerships for these goals is an SDG that helps us to see how we finance them and how we actually work on bigger issues of collaboration that will help for the sustainability or the achieved sustainability to be there for longer.  

So you can’t afford to leave one outside but you can use the space from which you separate to dig deeper in the area that supports the abilities and the work and the audience that you have—that you are—in the work that each people do.  

KARAM: And, indeed, you can also understand that argument to be how Elder Frew mentioned that there are priorities but the priorities do not impede collaboration.  

Therefore, in fact, they underline why it’s important for different religious communities and secular communities to work together because together they can achieve the intersections between all the priorities. 

Olivia, what would you care to share if you have any examples or issues that you would like to raise?  

WILKINSON: Yeah, you’ve really summarized it all very well. I was also just going to focus on that SDG 17 on partnerships because that’s where we can bring all these pieces together, and what we’ve been working on over the years is this idea of how do we do better collaboration between religious actors, the big development organizations, the big donor governments, for example, because there really are problems with the partnerships there.  

They don’t work well in many ways and there are ways that we can be—we can bring forward new strategies to make them work better. So get those partnerships working better and then work at the intersections of any of the other SDGs and that’s highly possible, and recognizing all those intersections of the SDGs together can happen within long-term trusting partnerships between religious actors and development organizations.  

KARAM: Indeed. And do we have—thank you both. 

And do we have any further questions, please?  

OPERATOR: We have a raised hand from Reverend Dr. Duane Larson. Please accept the unmute prompt and state your affiliation.  

Q: Musimbi, it’s good to see you again. It’s been a couple of decades, I believe, since we worked together around theology and development. My question builds on this good conversation that you both have engaged so far. 

Given that over this past generation, including the institution that I led where we’ve seen that efforts at theology and development formation of leadership have really waned and, perhaps, have actually to good effect as I last—was last aware, become even more focused in the Global South, I wonder how it is under increased stresses of economics and even, perhaps, especially the political situation in the West today how we might speak further what you might have envisioned strategically and tactically with respect, for example, to SDG 17.  

So, Musimbi, if you could, perhaps, give us some even more tightly focused visionary stimulants for hope—and Dr. Wilkinson engaged that question as well—I’d be very grateful. 

KANYORO: Pastor Larson, it’s so good to hear from you and I will make sure that I connect. 

First of all, I think that you are right in saying that the issues of more advocacy for more presence of leadership has—I don’t want to say has waned but I want to say that things that are happening in the world tend to silence the voices that are also doing large advocacy on women’s presence and women’s leadership. 

And the reason is if there are people dying from poverty and from hunger it’s likely that the focus by those that have the power to put media out there will prioritize probably those things and not the voice of advocacy because advocacy is very interesting, that it’s necessary to get the bigger changes that will impact more people because they go towards policies that actually influence many, many people.  

But it’s also usually the most vulnerable in terms of being funded, in terms of acceptability, et cetera. And, yes, in my opinion, the polarization and the reduction of advocacy issues of diversity, of inclusion, of sharing of spaces is detrimental to the question that you have asked about how we continue to progress the vision of leadership—of shared leadership.  

But I wouldn’t want to be tied there because there is always going to be people whom we should affirm who are doing advocacy but we must—when we take the SDGs, for example, see—again, I use that word—see how they are connected with the same concerns that we have of leadership and just take them—take each one of them with that in mind.  

My vision for change is at the moment, one, I really encourage that we should not let the multilateral organizations that we formed die without support if they need reform, and we should be committed to reforms within financial institutions, reforms for United Nations, et cetera. 

But when we break these organizations we will need to replace them with something, and so that’s one. The second thing that is important to me is that we begin to reframe the things that have lost their proper framing.  

For example, if we take the question of migration, migration will always be there. People have always migrated either in search of work or invited to work, or because they are running away from unsafe condition and they need care, and that is going to happen. It doesn’t matter for what country. 

But reframing it and not making it a place where we make the people—the very people that need the help to be considered as criminals I think that is wrong and I think this is where the religious groups should continue to work really hard and do very, very prominent advocacy to make this, the framing—the reframing of these issues better.  

Similarly, one of the SDGs talks about land. Another SDG talks about water. Another SDG talks about peace, justice, and strong institutions.  

Look, these are things that are so tangible for churches, for people who work with other communities, other faith communities, et cetera. These are things for which the data is available in faith communities all the time every day, and while researchers and the large institutions can continue to put this in languages that fit those spaces faith communities can put it in the language that every local person, whether they have an education or not, whether they are poor or rich, can understand.  

Domesticating the languages is, I think, a responsibility that pastors like yourself and other people who work with communities can do and do a very good job, and if the masses get it right I think the masses can move the momentum.  

KARAM: Thank you, Dr. Kanyoro. 

Olivia, you have written quite a bit about the partnership SDG 17, how it manifests or not in compliance with SDG efforts—different kinds of efforts. Do you want to, perhaps, elaborate a bit more on this, especially with a view to your strategic direction, guidance, advice?  

WILKINSON: Yes. So I was thinking this might be the moment to bring up this idea of strategic religious engagement that has gained some currency but, perhaps, is still pretty unknown elsewhere.  

So before USAID was destroyed they had a policy launched in 2023 on strategic religious engagement that many of us probably on the call contributed towards the consultations, et cetera, and some of us are still trying to keep alive in some ways at least the idea of it and the ideas contained within.  

And it’s—in the first place is a critique of what happens in these partnerships, the current status quo, which is that so many of the religion and development partnerships are these one-off short-term ad hoc situations in which all the partners get burnt out and they lead to more misunderstandings, miscommunication, misinformation, and potentially more harm.  

And so the idea of proposing something that’s more strategic—strategic religious engagement—is to say that there’s a better way of doing this that looks at long-term relationship building, systematically integrating that religious engagement into development programs over time so that it’s not just—we need to find a religious leader because there’s a crisis and something—you know, the house is falling down and we need to figure this out immediately.  

That you already have those relationships before the crises happen, that you know—also that you know where your points of commonality and departure are as well before the crises happen as well.  

You know, ideological differences are going to be some of the key points that break down partnerships, and those take time to understand each other and to talk through and also, potentially, to decide if you can’t be partners, which might be the case in some situations.  

And so strategic religious engagement is looking through all these different modes of partnership for development organizations and making recommendations of how they can do better in their relationship building with religious actors.  

I think that we still probably have a long way to go. I’m working on a project with Katherine where we’re trying to test and pilot some of these ideas, but at least there’s a little bit of a movement to say we don’t need to accept that status quo where these partnerships can be disastrous in some ways and there is a better way of doing things.  

KARAM: Thank you to both. Maybe we can take another question, please.  

OPERATOR: We have a raised hand from Chris Herlinger.  

Q: Yes. Hello. I’m calling in from New York. I’m a journalist for National Catholic Reporter. 

I’m curious what the panelists might think of the role of women and I’m thinking particularly of Roman Catholic sisters—nuns—in their advocacy for the SDGs. I cover the work of the sisters at the UN and I know that they’ve been very committed to the SDGs but they’re also, of course, committed to the work of the grassroots work that’s needed on the ground.  

But I’m just wondering if the panel might have anything to say about Catholic sisters.  

KARAM: Thank you for that question.  

Musimbi?  

KANYORO: They are great persons. In every community that I have seen and visited and seen their work I believe that they were really—God recognizes the value that they bring to the society, which is beyond what I can describe in words, and I just want to be grateful for Catholic sisters and their ministries in the world.  

KARAM: Olivia? 

WILKINSON: Yes. I think anyone that’s worked with Catholic sisters see that as well. I mean, that—you know, that point that I made earlier about health care provision where there’s no one else providing health care we know that at the end of the roads a lot of the time there is a sister doing what she can and connecting where she can to bring resources to people.  

There’s a project that we’ve worked on at Georgetown—Katherine’s very involved—trying to, you know, build—again, create this leadership role and demonstrate the leadership roles that some of the sisters can have and I think that projects like that, the work of various foundations and other programs, are demonstrating more and more how sisters can step into some of these places such as the G-20 Interfaith Forum that just happened that we’ve already mentioned and, really, we need to listen to those voices more and more, and that there’s many important examples from the world of the sisters that should be brought forward and we should do—we should document, et cetera, to make that case.  

KARAM: Thank you both. And thank you, Chris.  

KANYORO: There are many other women of faith also from the other faith communities whose work is just amazing—Hindu women, women from Baha’i religion, et cetera—women or just women from Christian religions who might not have—be identified by whatever title but they are just there as lay persons doing the work that needs to be done and all these need affirmation and recognition.  

KARAM: Thank you. Thank you, Musimbi, for making that point. And thank you, Chris, for putting your finger on the pulse of precisely what moves at the grassroots level.  

The closer we get to the grassroots and community level the more you are likely to see women leading from faith communities within faith communities. It is just the way that life is organized and the hierarchy is structured. So it is, indeed, a very critical and important role.  

I think it’s, in a sense, relatively easier to see the role of the nuns because they are better organized, like, into different institutions and structures and it’s also one of the reasons why it’s easier to see the work of the Christian communities in different spaces—development, humanitarian, and so on—because they’re easier to recognize and identify through their structures.  

It is much more onerous and challenging to identify the work of other faith communities including the women within them who also, like their Catholic counterparts, uphold so much of the service that takes place within those spaces.  

So thank you very much for helping us clarify and raising this question.  

Any more questions?  

OPERATOR: We have a written question from Shari Prestemon.  

If you would like to read out your question you may do so now. Please accept the unmute now prompt.  

Q: Thank you so much for this conversation. I appreciate it very much.  

The question I was asking has to do with making more explicit the connection between work on SDGs and the values and tenets and scriptures of—I come from the Christian background so in our case of the Bible.  

In the United Church of Christ we’re a denomination in the United States and we use SDGs as one of our lenses in our planning. However, what I see and know is that especially at a local church level they seem very distant, and because there is not—I’ve not seen an explicit articulation of how work on SDGs connects directly to the mandates of our faith it’s difficult for us to utilize them effectively as a lens.  

So could you talk about that? And if you have a resource in that regard I would love to know about it.  

KARAM: Could we just reverse the order for a second and just get Olivia to answer first and then—just to diversify a bit?  

Go for it, Olivia.  

WILKINSON: And I also see another question in the chat also talking about linking religious values to the SDGs as well and I think this is—you know, there’s parallels in the question.  

And, you know, I do—I can send resources and I’m happy to send resources of toolkits, et cetera, where some of this work has been done. They’re quite specific, though, a lot of the time so they’ll be looking at—you know, they’ll be looking at the question of malaria response or they’ll be looking at—a really good one I’m thinking of recently is maternal mental health from Christian Connections for International Health, and there’s parts of those toolkits where they discuss linking the religious language, religious values, religious texts to what they’re talking about in terms of the technical information.  

I mean, I think what we really see is you need that link. You need to have the technical information. You need the—you know the latest scientific research on malaria or whatever you’re talking about and then you have the place where you have the interpretation of the text and understanding how to link the values to the technical information and there are people that do this work.  

The thing that I found difficult when we’ve over the years in various different situations been asked to do that is the place of interpretation and so it’s really hard to put together a kind of universal guide for everyone to understand how religious values fit to this SDG because we know that values and the way that, you know, people interpret their texts are going to be different in different places.  

So there are lots of toolkits and then I would—and I’m happy to share them—and then I would also add the caveat that some of this needs to be discussed in your place in your context with the ways that you understand your values and positions, et cetera, because it’s not possible for one set of guidance really to do all that work for everyone around the world.  

KARAM: Dr. Musimbi? 

KANYORO: Thank you again.  

That was a good question and I’m sure that if we asked any of the people who are pastors and theologians to look at—to name any of these SDGs and look for what is the—the lady asked from a Christian perspective, what is the biblical text that would go with it, you would find equivalents.  

I know because that’s my area of study, theology and the biblical texts specifically, but I think that that’s not often how we work because we work to see the big scheme of what the scriptures of each religion tell us about how to live together.  

So they might tell us that don’t let people be hungry while you are having a lot of food. Share it. They might tell us something like violence is not a great thing to do; it’s really a bad thing to do, and then we look at the SDG that is able to look at the wholeness of human beings where we can see that there’s violence happening when there’s inequality. There’s violence happening when we don’t—when there’s no well-being in health, et cetera.  

So you have to be able to link what the values of the religion and the scripts of the religion and the dogma and the teaching and everything of your particular religion tell you about things which relate to these SDGs.  

And I said at some point that it’s important for the faith communities and especially those with enough education about what global institutions do together to domesticate and put it in the daily language that is relevant to the people that you are addressing.  

That contextualization only works well when you understand what these SDGs are and what the community that you are working with requires to make a difference. That, I think, everyone can do, and I’m sure that you’re doing a good job, but—and that there’s really no need for someone to give you a big—something that is different but for you to continue to see how you can interpret it for different communities so that they can really be focused on the actions that are needed.  

And, lastly, I wanted to say also on this question of our faith values, for me when I think about faith the opportunity—the other opportunity that we had is that we can actually increase the connection between SDGs and values.  

Because we are living in a world where values are being discarded, we are living in a world where nationalism is seen to be better than our global human—shared human community. We are living in a world where we are reducing the connection—the international connection—and engagement with each other and with other people.  

And I think that what faith communities can do more of is actually instead of less engagement with different communities really show us a value—more engagement. Instead of less caring do more caring. Instead of less valuing of human beings do more valuing of human beings.  

These are the interpretations that will make living out the SDGs and really giving them life and not as seventeen sentences in a book because these are things about people’s lives. These are comments about people’s lives.  

KARAM: Brilliant. And on that note, I think we can pay tribute to the speakers and those who have managed to raise their excellent questions by helping highlight and ensuring that we understand the value added of contextualization that faith leaders and religious communities in general are very adept at.  

That is their essential language to relate that which is happening around us and the imperatives thereof to the values that all faiths teach, essentially.  

I’m very pleased that you each mentioned very powerfully the moral voice, the authority that faith leaders and their religious institutions and organizations bring into the space and that you emphasized very strongly the value added and the utter necessity of partnerships that need to take place. 

Perhaps, also to thank the questioners and the speakers for bringing out and nuancing the role that women of faith who are the quintessential servant leaders in all communities and all faith traditions bring in terms of redefining leadership on what it portends, and the hope that by stronger collaboration including between different faith traditions we may actually see a shift in the pendulum towards the betterment of the lives of many.  

I do wish to bring up a few things that we missed hearing the names of but that you, the speakers and the questioners, alluded to very strongly. We spoke about values and the need to have them and to raise them as faith leaders and as leaders in today’s world, given the scarcity thereof and the absolutely untenable deaths that are being perpetuated intentionally in some parts of the world. 

But we have not mentioned human rights, which is perhaps one of the most extinct species, and we would not have had human rights had we not had values based in and on and through religion. We are able to celebrate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to have it because of the values common to all faiths.  

Had we not had faiths or religion we would have struggled to find human rights that are based on the common values thereof. We are, therefore, perhaps, more in need now than ever to understand and uphold the human rights of all at all times everywhere in the world without making the kinds of exceptions to human rights, lives, and dignities that we see being perpetrated by different leaders both male and female in today’s worlds.  

Another world that I hoped we could speak to a little bit longer but I think you have all mentioned it and alluded to it is the value added of multifaith multireligious collaboration. Interfaith is often taken for granted. We don’t seem to, perhaps, nuance sufficiently, in my opinion, how critical as a strategic effort this multireligious collaboration is.  

We speak about partnerships as though they were solely to happen between different secular actors. We do not see that there’s a moral imperative to multireligious partnerships and it is that moral imperative that makes a change when it actually takes place in our everyday lives. 

The success of many women of faith leaders around the world is based on the fact that they reach out and work with one another across not only geographic but specifically also across religious divides. That ability to collaborate across our religious and secular and institutional and ethnic and gender lines is what defines humanity and the dignity thereof in today’s world. 

Where we see a lack of that collaboration a gap in that willingness to work together as equals, not majority/minority, not better as Christians, worse as Muslims or Jews or Buddhists or Hindus but as equals, that lack, that gap, is where we see some of the most injurious and saddest and most preventable calamities and atrocities.  

At the end of the day, all faith traditions from the indigenous to the latest teach us that we are all creatures of the same being and that our nature is what sustains us, and as we respect nature we learn to respect one another and all living species.  

Where we miss that and where we don’t realize that if only we worked together we can save one another that no one community or person or gender or identity is safe when others are injured and dying.  

When we see that reality our faith leaders work together to help us uphold and become the conscience of the political. They don’t become the political. They become the conscience of the political spaces that we sorely need in today’s world.  

And with that, I want to thank you once again Dr. Musimbi Kanyoro, Dr. Olivia Wilkinson, and Irina Faskianos and all the people who have made this conversation possible. Thank you very much indeed.  

FASKIANOS: Thank you, Azza, for moderating this terrific conversation.  

I just wanted to say that we will circulate the transcript and the video to all of you to listen to it again and to share with your colleagues, and as always we welcome your suggestions by emailing us at [email protected] with feedback, suggestions, or anything else.  

So thank you all again. We look forward to continuing the conversation.